Understanding Learner's Personas in IT Transition for Effective Skill Development

Why Use a Learner Persona?

In response to significant workforce reductions of 25% and a rapid shift toward technical senior leadership, my government agency’s information technology (IT) organization has prioritized educational technology training to reskill and upskill remaining staff. Due to diverse roles and different digital skills, pinpointing training needs is challenging. One of the best methods to determine training needs is to use learner personas. Organizations often employ learner personas as a tool to understand a customer or user group’s experience (Weinhandl et al., 2022). Learner personas offer a structured method to identify and address diverse learning needs across roles. By capturing motivations, skill gaps, and preferred learning styles, personas help instructional designers align technology solutions with real-world learner profiles.

Creating a Learner Persona: A Walk-Through

Audience: IT government employees at my agency regarding reskilling and upskilling due to workforce reductions and the agency’s priority for knowledge of emerging technologies.

Development of Learning Persona (Template):

Walk-through of Creating a Learner Persona:

Golden (2022) stated that instructional designers should begin with envisioning a journey map before creating a persona. The journey map has six steps: awareness (how employees learn about the courses), consideration (how the course addresses their needs), action (steps taken by the employee), experience (enrolling in a class), repeat (signing up for another class), and loyalty (continuing to take courses and recommending them to others).

Once I understood my plan, I started creating two learning personas using this week’s recommended template. Golden (2022) explained that there are five critical steps for creating a persona: naming the personas, identifying the personas’ goals, determining the personas' needs, identifying the personas’ pain points, and identifying the personas’ personalities. I used the course’s recommended template to create two learning personas: Jill and Kevin. The learning personas represented IT contract representative officers (CORs) and IT budget analysts.